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Comment by mikert89 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, after a detection there is alot of work to determine if what they detected should be worried about. But this doesnt take away from the fact that cancer can be detected very early, and these screenings could easily save your life

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There's not a lot of evidence that full body MRIs are beneficial. A lot of people have pre-cancerous growths that may or may not become cancer in the future, so you may just be giving them unnecessary surgery, and surgeries are not risk-free. If you don't operate, they might develop an anxiety disorder.

We do a lot of CT imaging in the emergency department and it sucks if we incidentally find an abnormal growth in a young patient's CT head. These are usually benign and often not worth performing brain surgery to get a biopsy.

I had one at detected at 5mm close to the amigdala and they just scanned again in 3-6 months on MRI to prove it wasn't growing. That was a decade ago.

Why not just rescan them every few months to see if it's still growing? After all, you wouldn't have to rescan the full body, just the section where the growth is.

... or could do you harm, which is an important point.

To clarify is the harm that many healthy people would stress while it was confirmed the detection was not cancer?

No, the potential harm comes from follow-up tests. That's why screening strategies are designed by professionals. It's a pretty complex field, and all the people here fielding their opinions on how we should proceed about tests don't have a single idea about the implications of their theories.

this is medical gate keeping ("only the holy priests can practice medicine"), please take this attitude elsewhere

Honestly, you don't have access to the necessary data to make rational decisions. That's not gatekeeping, it's logic. I don't have access to it either, although I'm indeed a healthcare pro. Screening strategies are a hyperspecialized domain and only experts somewhat understand what they're doing. It's just like making theories about what the CERN guys should be doing while not having passed physics 101 with no access to experimental data. That's why I'm just saying: you're certainly allowed to question, but you certainly can't make up assertions either.

What a ridiculous statement to make. No wonder the US is in the state it is in. Lets let the ignorant and uninformed decide on policy rather than the scientific community and experts. What could possibly go wrong?

"my ignorance is as valid as your knowledge"

The internet is a powerful tool of communication, but turns out some people don't have anything worthwhile to communicate.

How could the screening do you harm? (other than financial)

What are you gonna do if the screening test comes back positive?

Get treated for the cancer you will now survive because you just caught early. The answer is so obvious I think I may have misunderstood what you mean here.

The fact that this answer is so obvious to you means you have to read up on diagnostic test performance and how screening works, because it's in fact not obvious at all. I mean that in the nicest way possible. Those companies offering expensive screening are not what they seem. Whether their offering is useful or whether they're just swindling you is a question that needs lots of time, money and sweat to answer.

What if it's just some lump that would not have developed into cancer? The surgery to get it removed isn't risk free.

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